Roaming traffic contributes a significant percentage of an operator's revenue and even a better percentage of the operator's margin. With increasing competition and regulatory control, operators are being more pressured to increase their roaming revenue and reduce roaming margin losses. Over the last few years, revenues to the network operators from home subscribers have consistently declined due to increased competition and resulting pricing pressures. On the other hand, revenues from roamers have consistently grown in the same period due to increased mobile penetration in local markets and an increase in travel. Various network operators have preferred bilateral roaming agreements (“partnerships”) with each other that include more favorable roaming charges than non-partnership operators. Therefore, “preferred” visited networks are those that the home network prefers its outbound roamers to register with when traveling outside their home coverage area. Non-partner networks are “non-preferred”.
Network operators can maximize their margins and the roamers can get more attractive roaming rates and services if roamers roam on their home mobile operator's preferred (or partner) networks. When the subscribers roam into visited networks from a HPMN, they may roam onto one, two or more VPMNs, one at a time, based on various criteria. These VPMNs may also include the “non-preferred” VPMN networks. Hence, protecting the existing roaming revenues and growing them further has become an important priority for the network operators worldwide. However, current methods of controlling which network a subscriber registers to when he/she is roaming have certain disadvantages.
The HPMN operators use traffic redirections techniques in their networks in order to discourage their subscribers' handsets to roam with the “non-preferred” VPMN networks. Sometimes, the HPMN operator can use traffic redirection techniques to control the distribution of outbound roamers among VPMN networks in a country so that the “preferred” VPMN network will get a very high percentage of the HPMN's roaming traffic and the “non-preferred” VPMN networks will get a low percentage of that roaming traffic. The general traffic redirection techniques are based on location update rejection error, timeout or abort techniques. The generation of these errors compels the mobile handset to initiate again a number of registration attempts.
The traffic redirection techniques can be applied to both GSM location updates as well as GPRS location updates. However, there are certain disadvantages in regular traffic redirection techniques. The problem is that when a roaming subscriber's mobile device is attached on GSM network, any attempt to steer the subscriber's GPRS location update will not be effective. Similarly, when the mobile device is attached on a GPRS data session, then traffic redirection attempt to steer the subscriber's GSM location update will not be effective. This is due to the reason that unlike GSM location update, GPRS location update can be sent during GPRS data session, hence, any steering attempt on GPRS location update is not effective, when the mobile device is already in a GPRS data session.
Moreover, there are also issues when the mobile device is already having a GPRS session with a non-preferred VPMN network, it can stay attached for a long time and HPMN traffic redirection attempts on subsequent GSM location updates from the mobile device will not be effective. This problem is further accentuated with the increasing usage of mobile devices like Blackberry, iPhone etc., which have the capability to keep their GPRS sessions alive by default. In such cases traffic steering when GPRS session is alive is not possible.
In accordance with the foregoing, there is a need in the art of a system, a method, for creating a solution that gives an operator the ways to deal with above mentioned problems and be able to steer the roaming and data traffic to a network of their choice.